[AndrewStephens]

A few reasons:

1) Although the site serves up images at 1024 pixels (or whatever) today, in the future they may want larger images. When everyone is rocking 10K monitors and 6K phone displays, those small images are going to look pretty bad.

2) The original image has some metadata that they want to keep (geolocation, etc).

3) They think they can do a better and more consistent job resizing than the various browsers, which is probably true.

[malux85]

agree on 3) most browsers just use linear interpolation when resizing images, which makes sense from a performance point of view, but looks terrible. Better to use a bi-linear or cubic resize, more computing up front, but better images, this is probably the reason they do it

[amelius]

But soon you can do any type of resizing through WASM on the browser.

[XCSme]

You can already do it, just use a library or implement your own scaling function and don't use the built-in image resize functions.

[searealist]

bi-linear is linear interpolation

[nice_byte]

I think they may have meant "nearest-neighbor", which isn't true for any browsers that I know of.

Regardless, there are still better filters than bilinear, i.e. Lanczos, which I'm pretty sure none of the browsers use.

[trumpeta]

This is my understanding as well, you could kill a browser trying to do single-threaded bilinear or cubic resize on a sufficiently large image.

[Poefke]

If you resize the image in steps, with each resize at least 50% of the previous step, you can do a pretty decent approximation of cubic resize using the canvas. Doing this for a year now, we've gotten no complaints and we have designers as clients :)

[SaltyBackendGuy]

> 2) The original image has some metadata that they want to keep (geolocation, etc).

Isn't exif data something you should strip out?

[indiandennis]

Discord makes most of their revenue from selling user data so they probably want to keep as much as possible.

[RussianCow]

Do you have a source? That's a pretty bold claim, and I haven't seen anything else to back that up.

[hintss]

pretty sure they've directly stated that they're not selling user data

[gruez]

to be fair, you could say the same of facebook/google. they're not selling the data (giving it to third parties), but they're making money off it.

[Operyl]

Sure, they serve said data to other authorized users and clients (intended recipients). Name a business that doesn’t do that. ;)

[Moru]

Our site would have been happy with full res images from the start. As it is now we are stuck with 80x80 images that needs replacing with higher res images since the originals was not kept in any sorted order.

[Xeoncross]

So you kept the originals, but didn't organize them into a way you could use them later?

[Moru]

Long story but from the start we kept originals organized. Then we restructured and the new people couldnt care less and threw away originals or left them named 1,2,3 and so on. All useless now.